Simple tips and advice on how to improve your home with this expert Home Improvement Blog.

Month: June 2017

Natural light boasts many health benefits, as well as saving you cash on your utility bills and generally creating a better aesthetic in your home or property (avoiding that orangery glow of lamp uplighters in every room). So, ensuring your home is making the most of natural light can transform your property, not only making it a better place to live, but also adding value to the property too.

Some of the Health Benefits associated with natural light are:

Increased Serotonin (the body’s natural anti-depressant)

Improved quality of sleep

Improved circulation

Increased levels of vitamin D (required for healthy bones)

These health benefits can contribute to a better quality of life in general.

As a result of these benefits, many builders, employers, and home owners are now looking for ways to increase the amount of natural light in their properties due to the numerous benefits it offers. This technique is known as ‘daylighting’: increasing the amount of daylight entering a property so as to reduce utility costs, and take advantage from its health benefits.

Natural light is a practical solution to expensive lighting and heating bills, and creating effective natural light sources in properties is increasingly important. You will notice that many newly built properties now feature larger windows and skylight windows to take advantage of opportunities to use natural light throughout the property.

Here are some ways you can increase natural light in your property:

Skylight Windows:Installing flat roof skylights is by far the best method for increasing natural light in your property. Flat roof skylights can flood a room with natural light. This is a particularly useful method for extensions, and darker spaces such as narrow hallways and bathrooms.

2. Bi-Folding Doors: These are a great feature in Kitchens and Living Rooms, bringing a little bit of the outside in. Bi-Folding doors cover a vast area of space, and you can install them to almost take up space across thewhole wall, letting in lots of natural light.

Making use of slopedceilings and roofs: If your property has sloped ceilings, they can be practical in directing natural light into your property. Slopes facing away from the fenestration area (the placement of the windows/doors) improve surface brightness, so they act to direct more light into the space as they can help direct more light into the room.

You can also install skylight windows into sloped roofs to optimise daylighting, which is great for loft conversions and attic rooms.

Reflection: Carefully planning reflection of the natural light entering your property can also make a huge difference for darker spaces. Reflection of natural light can be achieved through the careful placement of mirrors to reflect light back into a room; large shiny tiles can have a similar effect. However, you will need to take care to avoid direct beams of light as this can pose some health and safety issues as well as leading to discomfort (from overheating, glare etc.)

Alternatively, you can decorate using specific colour schemes, such as bright whites, and pastels, which absorb less of the natural light entering the room almost making it ‘bounce’ back off the surface and lighten up a room.

High Windows:Installing high windows is one of the most effective methods for increasing natural light into a property, and this is best achieved through the installation of skylight windows. High windows allow for more daylight to enter the property due to their positioning, without creating too much brightness. Skylight windows can also offer a practical solution to rooms and spaces where a regular window would be difficult to install e.g. basement conversions, exterior walls with an obstructed view.

Creating more natural light in a property has no end of benefits, and can even add to the design of your property. Think carefully about what you want to achieve with natural light in a particular space, then consider the best option from there.